Attn. Tropics: Keep your storms to yourself!

Sunday, September 14 the remnants of Hurricane Ike rolled through my area. No rain to speak of, but the wind blew 60-80 mph all day long. By 3PM or so most of the area was without power as trees across the Miami Valley snapped or fell over, taking powerlines with them.

Not realizing at the time just how widespread the damage was, I wasn’t too concerned about the power, thinking it would be back on in no time. As it turned out, things were much worse than I’d realized. The Governor promptly declared my county (and several others) “Disaster Areas”. By the time I conceded that I needed to get some supplies (Tuesday), they were in short order. ‘C’ or ‘D’ batteries were no where to be found and Kroger was selling ice as fast as they could bag it up. I got ice, hoping to save my freezer full of Vermont Mystic Pies (tragically, that endeavor was doomed to failure), peanut butter and bread. I spent a week bored out of mind, reduced to eating peanut butter sandwiches and fast food and very thankful for Tim Horton’s coffee, having a gas water heater, and my XPower Powerpack 600HD, which I used to power my laptop and DSL modem and then recharged in the car while I drove around searching (in vain) for some sign of repair crews actually repairing. I know they were out there, working hard, It just would have been reassuring to have seen them doing something other than driving to and fro.

DP&L reported that 300,000 of its 515,000 customers lost power Sunday, Sept. 14.
Here’s the breakdown of DP&L customers without power, day-by-day:
Sept. 15: 300,000
Sept. 16: 200,000
Sept. 17: 105,000
Sept. 18: 80,000
Sept. 19: 65,000
Sept. 20: 51,000
Sept. 21: 38,000
Sept 22: 28,000
Sept. 23: 13,000
Sept. 24: 8,000

My power was restored just as I was getting ready to leave for work Friday night, the 19th. It was then that I discovered that my cable was out. Does the torture never end?

Finally Tuesday night around 5PM two trucks from Time Warner Cable showed up, they spent the next several hours circling the block, working on the wires, finally getting my cable back on at 8:50PM. Supposedly they will credit my bill for the time from 24 hours after the power was restored until the cable was restored, 73+ hours. Personally, I don’t think I should have to pay for any of the time that service was interrupted, but according to the Public Utilities Commission, they are only liable for the time after power was restored. Oh well.

In summation, I would just like to say this to the Tropics:

Keep your damned storms to yourself! We don’t send you our blizzards, do we?

Seriously, there is just something terribly wrong about suffering this sort of inconvenience at the hands of a hurricane/tropical storm while not enjoying any of the benefits of a tropical climate.
That’s all I’m saying.

I Can’t Resist a Bargain

I’ve got a laptop that I’ve had for, I don’t know, maybe 7 years. Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking it’s probably time to upgrade the operating system from Windows 98 (I know! crazy, huh?). A while back I set it up to dual-boot with Kubuntu 8.04, and that really served to highlight just how dated Win98 is.

So, I’ve been seriously debating ditching 98 altogether and just running Linux, or possibly installing XP. Last week I was perusing eBay and came across a pretty sweet little IBM NetVista box for sale; 2Ghz P4, 512M of Ram, a $71 ‘Buy it now’ price (+$20 shipping) and best of all, it came with XP Pro installed. This set the wheels to turning;
I’ve got an XP Pro CD, I could use this computer’s activation key, install XP on the laptop, install Linux on the new ‘puter and add a new member to my computer minions, all for less than I would have paid to buy XP for the laptop (and with no “piracy” issues)!
Done, done, and done!
I just finished installing XP Pro on the laptop, activating it with Micro$oft, and updating it to SP3. The “new” NetVista is contentedly crunching numbers for BOINC, and I feel like a frugal demented genius… or something.